Symptohm

Let me count the ways I love Symptohm:
(1) It takes a static picture of a sound and breathes life into it. You can twist and pull and wrench and turn that sound over and under, backwards and forwards. The results are full and rich *and* clear and penetrating, and, most of all, musical. It does bread and btter with the same ease as deep fried peyote muffins.
(2) It introduces both a new form of synthesis and the Melohman technology. So it's innovative, too, something that immediately differentiates it from 99% of the plug-ins out there. And these innovations aren't just of the madly experimental sort, but are highly useable. Melohman, particularly, is aimed at players, not just tweakers, although it's a tweaker's delight, too. There's no other synth out there that can do these things: reason enough to buy it.
(3) It has, in the funky skin, the nicest GUI I have ever seen. I love the fact that ohmforce covered it in strange drawings and weird victorian decoration. And more mad apes than you can shake a stick at.
(4)Artistic merits aside, it's a clear and logical design: the signal flow is mapped onto the GUI itself. Which is handy given all the routing configurations. And as already mentioned, those knobs just ooze quality.
(5) There's more modulations per square centimetre than any other synth I have ever used. Virtually every parameter can have it's own envelope and its own lfo. Adding modulations doesn't thin the sound out the way it does in so many plugins.
(6) The filters sound really, really good. The quadfromage concept fits perfectly here.
(7) Metapatches are also an excellent solution to a perennial problem: you create an excellent patch but you have to tweak it slightly for different tracks. So you end up saving the same named preset all over the place. Metapatches centralise this and allwo you to switch easily between variations.
(8) Ohmforce support is among the best in the business.

What don't I like, then? To be honest, not too much. The are elements on the GUI that could be easier to read (a few too many shades of grey in places) but once you know what they do it doesn't matter. The multiple levels of modulation and routing could be confusing for a newcomer, but then you don't have to use these features to their fullest: Symptohm functions very well as a rwo oscillator single filter synth. Mising features? I'd like to be able to modulate the modulators, and modulate the filters using the oscillators as well. The documentation is clear if a bit on the brief side. A tutorial would be helpful for the less experienced user, particularly regarding routing.

Reading over this review, it sounds more like a marketing release, but I am genuinely blown away. I don't work for ohmforce, nor do I have any affiliation with them. I just love their work. Symptohm has become my favourite synthesizer, hardware included, and the first thing I load when I start new projects.Read Review